When others are thinking online, some are thinking lean, mean, and dead tree. On May 6, the Colorado Springs Gazette will launch a free, four-day-a-week paper that combines original reporting, readers’ stories, wire stories and content repurposed from the parent paper, the Gazette announced yesterday. The paper’s motivation is ostensibly to create a vehicle that can attract ads from companies that may not have the budget to advertise in the big paper.

“The Gazette has this huge footprint and only a small portion of it is relevant to a small business,” Gazette publisher Steve Pope said.

While this venture, named Ink, seems unlikely to create any new jobs traditionally associated with the launch of a new product, if it’s successful, it may save some jobs at the Gazette (which is not publicly held so we’re not sure how much money they’ve lost this year).